THE FIRST DATA RELEASE OF THE KODIAQ SURVEY

We present and make publicly available the first data release (DR1) of the Keck Observatory Database of Ionized Absorption toward Quasars (KODIAQ) survey. The KODIAQ survey is aimed at studying galactic and circumgalactic gas in absorption at high redshift, with a focus on highly ionized gas traced by O VI, using the HIRES spectrograph on the Keck I telescope. KODIAQ DR1 consists of a fully reduced sample of 170 quasars at 0.29 < z(cm) < 5.29 observed with HIRES at high resolution (36,000 <= R <= 103,000) between 2004 and 2012. DR1 contains 247 spectra available in continuum normalized form, representing a sum total exposure time of similar to 1.6 megaseconds. These coadded spectra arise from a total of 567 individual exposures of quasars taken from the Keck Observatory Archive (KOA) in raw form and uniformly processed using a publicly available HIRES data reduction package. DR1 is publicly available to the community, housed as a higher level science product at the KOA. We will provide future data releases that make available additional quasars, including those with pre-2004 observations taken with the previous-generation HIRES detectors.